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iPhone apps outsell entire US mobile market

Those in the mobile content game have to take a serious look at some of the stats emerging for the iPhone, with iFund manager Matt Murphy claiming “the iPhone is the place to be”.

“One of the statistics we’ve been looking at is the figure Steve Jobs quoted of there being 60 million downloads in the first 30 days. If you strip out ringtones and wallpaper sales for all the U.S. carriers combined, that’s more downloads than they have in an entire quarter. That means 10 million iPhone users are outselling the entire U.S. market of 250 million mobile devices,” he observes.
Murphy was speaking with Tricia Duryee of MocoNews.net. He’s the manager of the Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers $100 million iFund, which invests in iPhone developers, (not at a particularly rapid rate – it has financed five so far).

Agreeing that Apple has a cult following, Murphy observed the company to be the first to have successfully delivered a solution to the app discovery conundrum for smartphone users. “Others will have a hard time replicating what they’ve done, but the efforts will be good for the industry, and offer consumers more choice and developers more opportunity to reach the consumers,” he explains.

He also observed the prevailing business model to be favouring ad-subsidised set-ups (a la CoolGorilla’s phrasebooks made in conjunction with LaastMinute.com), or hybrid free apps with paid versions or monthly charges for additional features.

Murphy also made a few observations on Google’s own mobile plans for Android, commenting, “It is good to have another open mobile platform out there, and it’s good for the entire mobile industry because it continues to need catalysts to get it to move away from past models focused on closed environments.”